Post Yom Kippur - All Atoned Up And Ready To A-Go! – Don’t Get Me Started!

I’m sure that there are many of you who did not realize that this past Monday was Yom Kippur. The reason I can imagine that a lot of you didn’t know is because we have three calendars in my home and two out of the three got it completely gone. That’s right, my spouse even thought it was Rosh Hashanah, complete with the “Happy New Year” card when I awoke (although it wasn’t a real Rosh Hashanah card as my spouse knows what I know, that they just don’t have the Jewish Holiday cards readily available) and as two of the calendars had proclaimed it was Rosh Hashanah too alas when he found out I was staying home from work, fasting and doing some real high level thinking he gave me a look as if to say I had gotten it wrong, showed me what the calendar said and then throwing his hands up said, “Well, Happy Rosh Kippur, I’m done.”  As he went around checking the other calendars, he came back to me and said, “Well no wonder there are never any cards, no one knows when your holidays are because the date changes every year. I have no sympathy for you.” Subject closed. So I can imagine that there are many who don’t get the whole Jewish holidays and why the date changes every year  (you see, the Jewish calendar is lunar, with each month beginning on the new moon, not the calendar date). Anyway, I fasted, I thought, I prayed and now I find I’m all atoned up and ready to a-go! – Don’t Get Me Started!

While some people spend their Yom Kippur (the holiest day on the Jewish calendar) in synagogue praying, I decided a long time ago that for me spirituality is really personal and while I wouldn’t say I’d never go to synagogue again, I have a real problem with all organized religions and most of the people who supposedly run the religions so I decided the best way for me to really observe the holiday is with myself. I spend time thinking a lot about not only the prior year but many prior years. Reflecting on choices I made that were good and the ones that were not so good. As someone who has always believed one of the most important things in life is to take responsibility for your own actions and that you are also the one who creates your own destiny, I’ve found it a really good exercise for my soul to take this day each year (wherever it may fall on the calendar) to unplug the phones and computers and anything that distracts me from listening to myself and just focus on the life I’ve created for myself, how it affects the people around me and what I want to do differently (if anything) moving forward. I will tell you that the fasting seems to help.

The first couple of hours are tough for me; I have a mind that is constantly going in a million directions so to even try to quiet it is difficult for me. I think that’s where the empty stomach comes in to help, no indigestion from something I ate or thinking about what I’m going to be having for lunch takes a lot of what’s normally running through my mind, or any Jew’s for that matter.  And by hour three or so I’m really starting to take a good look at myself (whether I like what I see or not). I won’t go into any detail but let me just say that I had plenty of past choices and life stuff to examine over the next hours until sundown. Having to face yourself is one of the most exhausting things ever and when all was said and done while I did feel ready to tackle life before me I also was thankful that this was only a once year occurrence. Sure I  self-reflect from time to time throughout the year but this was the hardcore stuff, the stuff that you’ll only admit to yourself late at night (and sometimes not even then if you can get your hands on enough Ambien).

So as I made my way back into the world, turning on my phone to discover that I had over 100 emails and several voicemails, I turned off my “out of office” on my computer and re-entered the world looking exactly as I had the day before except there was a difference. I’m more aware of my surroundings and how I interact with them, I have a heightened sense of awareness that will most likely fade after time (like the feeling you used to have after roller skating for an hour and then taking the skates off still feeling as though you had them on for another hour or so), inside me I feel a little more mentally toned up. Or should I say, “tuned up” like we used to have done to our cars to make them run a little better? That’s right, I’m ready to run a little better with the race that is human, seeing my role a little clearer and understanding that I’m writing the script, producing and directing this life so while I’ll listen to what the critics have to say, I have to be true to my own artistic sensibility when creating the staged masterpiece that is my life. Sure there will still be some brush up rehearsals, drama in the second act so that there can be a resolution by the time I reach my third and final act but I’m coming out of the wings and taking the stage so get ready world cause I’m all atoned and nowhere to a-go! – Don’t Get Me Started!

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Hate Must Be Awfully Awful To Live With – Don’t Get Me Started!

I get a lot of comments from the blogs I write, most of them are very complimentary, telling me how I managed to put into words that the person writing in has felt, thought, etc. but on occasion there are the negative comments. Most I leave on my website because I’ve always felt is better to know that the “enemy” is still out there and I’d much rather have someone admit that they don’t like me rather than be nice to my face and then do and say hateful things behind my back. Most of the time I find a way to make those comments into a new blog (See my video blog about people who use the word, “faggot” never seeming to know how to spell it here - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hv3HPAA6kqU). All that said, I recently was blindsided by a comment from someone who obviously subscribes to the hate is a good way to go and I found myself feeling sorry for him, thinking that hate must be awfully awful to live with – Don’t Get Me Started!

One of the most popular blog entries I ever wrote was entitled, “Gay Baby Names” it was all about some friends of mine who had just had a baby and how even if we don’t have a stereotypical “gay” sounding name given to us by our parents, we tend to “gay up” our names as we get older. It was a silly little piece however it never ceases to amaze me how many people viewed that particular entry. So many people viewed it that I finally added a piece at the bottom of it asking people to let me know how they came across the entry. Were they looking for baby names and trying to avoid a “gay” name or what? Some interesting comments, you can read them all here - http://hubpages.com/hub/Gay_Baby_Names. Although I posted it in 2007 it still gets many views a day so I’m never really surprised by the comments that still come in on this particular post. But this past week came this comment from someone named, Matt. No last name, no link to a website as some comments have and I wasn’t surprised because the people who post the most hateful comments always seem to cloak themselves in the anonymity afforded people on the World Wide Web. As I’ve oft written, I imagine them in front of their computers in a hovel with their Cheetoh stained fingers typing at the keys when they probably have lovely homes and are not the Uni-Bomber at all.

Here’s the comment:

What got me about the comments above were that he obviously hadn’t even read the entry. He also doesn’t have a sense of humor either. I wondered who his “gay mates” were and whether or not they would still want to be his mate if they knew he was posting this kind of crap on the Internet. I wondered why these people never seem to use punctuation properly or know how to spell check anything but more than anything, I thought about just how exhausting it must be to walk around with all this hate inside you. While my blog started by me taking aim at all the things that pissed me off, I don’t really carry hate in my heart, not like Matt seems to have in his heart. I hope he feels better that he got it off his chest but this is a comment that will not appear on my website (other than in this blog) because sometimes there’s nothing to be learned from hateful words and people. Sometimes, I think it’s better that they don’t get the attention they seem to crave, that when they visit the place where they shat their hate that it’s all clear and clean. And let’s face it, we gays are good at cleaning up, right?

Still there’s a part of me that wondered why I wanted to write a blog about it. I’m a lover of old movies and I put in a DVD of mine this past weekend of Gentlemen’s Agreement – a Gregory Peck movie where he plays a magazine journalist who does a story on Anti-Semitism. When his young son asks what Anti-Semitism is at breakfast, he stumbles a bit but does the best he can to explain. Peck’s mother encourages her son (Peck) and the way he handled the topic with his son (Dean Stockwell) though Peck is still frustrated with being given the assignment and trying to figure out an angle for it. His mother explains why this story would be so important to tell, “I don’t know. Maybe it hasn’t been said well enough. If it had, you wouldn’t have had to explain it to Tommy, or your father and I to you. It would be nice sometime not to have to explain it…to someone like Tommy. Kids are so decent to start with.” I guess that’s why I write often about people who express their hate for me because I’m gay or Jewish or a number of other things. It’s my hope that maybe sometime we wouldn’t have to explain it anymore, that people and humanity will change enough where we’ll becoming truly accepting of one another for our sameness as well as our differences. All we can do is hope, right? Hate must be awfully awful to live with – Don’t Get Me Started!

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Why Pet Owners Can’t Help Treating Their Pets Like Children – Don’t Get Me Started!

I’ve oft written about the experiences I’ve had since taking in two stray cats. Up to the point where we got the two cats (a brother and sister who had been abandoned and literally walked through our patio door one nice evening) my family had only had one pet during my formative years. We had a dog that was a Cockapoo that was a gift for my brother when his asthma prevented him to continue the horse riding he had loved so much. He named the dog Apollo Skylab and we had him for a long time. I was completely unprepared for owning cats but over the course of the last five years of having them I feel as though I’ve been a responsible and pretty damn good owner. But as I crept more and more into that dangerous water of becoming one of “those” pet owners who talk incessantly about their animals and think everything they do is adorable, I resisted as much as possible and stayed in the shallow end of that pool. But a recent event got me to thinking why we pet owners just can’t seem to help ourselves. Why pet owners can’t help treating their pets like children – Don’t Get Me Started!

As my life got taken over by cat toys, rollers of masking tape to remove their hair from everything I owned (a futile but much needed task because within moments it can get completely out of control until your whole life is covered in fur) and catering to their likes and dislikes in their food, the room temperature and everything else I discovered that while I didn’t see them as my children, I treated them that way. In a way you can’t help yourself because they seem like a baby, so helpless. After all, they can’t tell you what’s wrong or what they need(though I know some people are convinced that they communicate in a non-verbal, ESP sort of way, the bottom line is that they can’t actually speak to you and say, “No, I don’t want that food, it sucks, I don’t care that it was on sale.” Instead they simply look at you with what seems a disgusted sneer and then scratch around the food bowl as if they’re covering it up like a turd. Sure, you get the message loud and clear but they didn’t really “speak” to you.)  And like a baby, they need you to feed them, brush them, love on them so that they can become decent full grown pets, right? So it’s easy to see how the lines become a bit blurry.

And like parents my spouse and I sometimes chastise one another for not “parenting” as the other thinks he should be parenting. “If you keep letting them wake you up in the middle of the night to pet them that’s all they’re ever going to do, you don’t expect them to know that you have to work tomorrow and stop on their own do you? You’ve taught them to wake you up when they want attention so that’s what they’re going to do.” This is a common comment from my spouse when I tell him I’m exhausted in the morning and it’s the cats’ fault. Just writing that makes me cringe but you (and more to the point, I) have to admit it sounds awfully “parenting” to me.

But recently I discovered just how far I’ve slipped into the abyss of cat owners who think of their pets as their children. Due to the fact that our cats started their lives (we think) outside, we’ve always allowed them to be indoor/outdoor cats. The male is a big cat that is the most needy cat you’ve ever met in your life. When he’s inside he has the need to be on my lap all the time. Sometimes I find myself trying not to sit down for fear he’ll see me sitting and immediately jump into my lap. The female cat is very tiny (runt of the litter we think) with an alien-like look that often gives me the feeling that she’s disgusted with me. But they’re very loving cats that spend a lot of time on our laps and purring loudly. Well the other day I was outside and there was our male cat outside too. He was just strolling about and as I got closer to him I noticed that this cat who can’t stand to be anywhere but on my lap when inside was ignoring me when he was outside. That’s right, he wouldn’t look at me (even when I called his name) and he just scooted about in front of me as if he had no idea who I was and that’s when it really started to sink in. I had become the parent of a teenage cat. I immediately felt as though he was embarrassed by me and that his acting like he didn’t know me was to “save face” in front of his cat friends. Can any of this be founded in reality? Absolutely not. But I certainly felt that way so all my efforts over these past years were in vain. All the promising not to do holiday cards with pictures of my cats on them or entering them into the “cute cat picture” contests was in vain too. Without a doubt and with much humiliation, I have to admit it, I’ve become one of those people, one of those people who consider their pets to be their children. Let’s just hope my cat grows out of this current phase he’s in soon so that I can get him into a good college. I’m going to go be sick now. Why pet owners can’t help treating their pets like children – Don’t Get Me Started!

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MIT Students Create Facebook Gaydar Software! – Don’t Get Me Started!

It was bound to happen, right? As we all “friended” everyone we knew (and for some, people they sort of or didn’t know at all) on our Facebook page there were bound to be some negatives to all the positives of discovering that person you used to sit next to in algebra in the ninth grade. I personally feel the negatives are the people who I was never really close to but knew from work or school who have now found me and want to send me enormously long missives (complete with photos) of their 2.5 children and their dog. I DON’T CARE!!! But some students at MIT decided to do some of what they do best, analyzing to see if they could discover if someone was gay, not by that profile pic of them wearing a t-shirt that said, “Pitcher” but by the company they kept. Or in this case, by the friends they have on their Facebook page. MIT students create Facebook gaydar software! – Don’t Get Me Started!

While I’ve all ready read on one blog about how to “un-gay” your Facebook page so as they put it, “your boss won’t know” (Something I just find really weird. If you have a boss that you’re putting as a “friend” on Facebook and they don’t know you’re gay, it’s not going to take software for them to figure out who gets you software hard). And while I do find it interesting that all these college kids find ways to take modern technology and do all their testing and software designing to earn grand degrees from such a prestigious school, I think I could have saved them all a lot of money, time and effort. For that matter, any of us gays of a certain age could have most likely saved them their efforts because whether you believe in gaydar or not, it often doesn’t take some “Spidey” sense to figure out who is gay and who isn’t, it just takes some powers of deduction. That’s right, we gays have be Gaylock Holmes for years.

Back in the day, there was no Facebook, in fact allow me to go even further back into the technological prehistoric times before there was even AOL or the Internet. Yes new gays, there was a time like this and gays were still able to do everything from find long lasting relationships to long lasting lube to be used with a short lasting acquaintance in the alley behind a 7/11. It may have started with the little than longer eye contact between two men but really if you wanted to know who was “A friend of Dorothy” back in the day, you had to use all your powers of deduction. You see back in the 1970’s (I was really too young during this time but let’s just say I had a heightened sense of gay awareness that would serve me well until I could get into the 80’s and became old enough to understand and act on my gayness.) in the 70’s it was more about the people you associated with I think. Which to no surprise is the premise of the new MIT report, it’s about the company you keep. Back in the 70’s the “gay ghetto” was born, areas of a town where gays lived, worked and worked it out. By the 1980’s we had renovated these areas and made them fabulous for gays and straights alike until we sold them to the straights in the 1990’s and made a crap load of money off of our good taste and ability to take something that was less than pleasing and make it appealing to the masses. But allow me to stop this somewhat history lesson and get back to finding out who is gay without the neighborhood, “Pitcher” shirt or assless chaps.

You see, you used your powers of deduction by first watching the gay. Was the possible gay well dressed, witty, and using references from old Hollywood movies or Broadway? If so, you were on your way. Sure it’s a stereotype but don’t forget that sometimes stereotypes are stereotypes because they’re true and back in the day this was the case. If you got past meeting someone in a non gay bar environment and were still unsure about their gayness then you had to do some more digging, shall we say. If you got into the car and the 8-track was Donna Summer you were getting closer to discovering gayness. If you eventually made it to the guy’s apartment and/or house then you could easily find out if he was gay. How you ask? By doing what we all do – excusing yourself to go to the restroom and then going over it like a CSI detective. If your host was occupied and you could get a peek into their nightstand then you should have everything you need to know if someone was gay or not.

The above is not to say that all gays back in the day were screaming queens. In fact, quite the opposite. I think that outside the areas of towns like the gay ghettos it was increasingly important for the physical health of the gays that they appear as straight as possible. But get to one of their houses and see Nagle or Erte’ prints on the wall or find poppers and or lube in the nightstand drawer and I don’t care how much they were talking about sports they were interested in your tight end and making you a wide receiver before the night was through.

So while I’m glad that technology has made it easier for all of us to connect to one another (and then set the privacy settings so that the same people we “friended” can no longer see anything about us) the one thing that I really don’t need Facebook to tell me is who is gay. It’s sort of like when Tivo came out and everyone was worried that their Tivo thought they were gay by the shows it chose for them based on their other recorded shows. There’s a lot for us gays to worry about, rights, marriage, disease, and the list goes on and on. As a man who has been out since the time he was five, lip syncing to Barbra Streisand in his living room to “Second Hand Rose” with a silk red rose from my mother’s floral arrangement in his teeth, I’m not too worried about technology outing me. Good for the MIT kids but kids, like with most things, all you really needed was a gay, not software to figure out who’s gay and who isn’t on Facebook. We could have saved you hours of research and energy. MIT students create Facebook gaydar software! – Don’t Get Me Started!

Falling Out Of Friend On Facebook And Life – Don’t Get Me Started!

When I first joined Facebook there was almost an immediate glut of people wanting to “friend” me. It gave me a warm and fuzzy feeling inside. While I’ll admit there were people that I thought I had gotten rid of from my life long ago and were now suddenly here trying to get back into my life (many did not make it, staying in Facebook purgatory – the inbox – or just being “ignored”) on the whole the Facebook connection was a good way to sort of re-connect with those from high school, past jobs, etc. But as time moved on, I found that my inbox was less and less full. What had once annoyed me, that there were so many people trying to “friend” me had now turned into an old Peggy Lee song, “Is that all there is?” As time moved on there were less and less people trying to “friend” me and so I began to think, is the number of people trying to find me on Facebook so finite that I’ve reached my limit for doing nothing and having people want to “friend” me? Sure, I’ve done some half-assed searching for people and friended some that way but the exciting thing for me was having someone else seek you out and you having to do nothing. Falling out of “friend” on Facebook and life – Don’t Get Me Started!

As I learned more and more about the security settings (placing certain people in what I called the “censored” list – meaning they could see very little to nothing of what was posted on my “wall”) I began to realize that some of the people who either accepted my “friend” request or I had accepted theirs suddenly seemed non-existent in the land of Facebook. Could they have done what I did to them? Put me in a group that didn’t really get to see all that much of their “wall” or information? It’s a little hard to get indignant about something that you have done to someone else when you find out they’ve done it to you, yet I still managed to do it. When my brother and I would fight when we were little my father would say, “You can dish it out but you can’t take it.” Well, that’s exactly how I feel right now, it’s okay for me to isolate certain people in the Facebook world but I’ll be damned if I’ll let them do the same to me. Well, let’s face it, even a control freak like me understands he has no control over this but it won’t stop me from bitching about it.

So then as often happens with my mind, I began to think about the whole idea of Facebook friends and how life used to be before Facebook. Remember when you had “real” friends that you would call, email and even back in the day write a letter to? Think about all of the people that you managed to keep in touch with, without a “wall” a “quiz” to forward or an online who’s who of your life. In my opinion, it was easier to compartmentalize the people in your life than Facebook friends. You knew if you told a particular person something that everyone in your immediate circle would know within hours. You knew the people who would take your secrets to the grave and as awful as it may sound, you un-friended people, just like Facebook only in real life you did it by allowing more and more time go between “get togethers” or talking on the phone until they “got the message” and faded away from your life. Sure it may be easier to “un-friend” someone with the touch of a button but does it hurt any less then when you came to the conclusion that a friend (or friends) were no longer moving in the same direction as you and so you moved on without them?

Look, most of the people I have on my Facebook are acquaintances at this point. They either knew me in high school or from some other time in my life. I haven’t evolved all that much but the online friendships renewed by Facebook in most cases require very little and are as surface level as they come. A comment on someone’s wall every once in awhile, a note on their birthday perhaps but on the whole it requires very little and I have to give very little of myself. I guess what I’m trying to say is that I miss the burden of friendship. The need because they were a friend and meant so much to you that you returned the call, email or letter as soon as possible. Now I can allow something to sit in my Facebook inbox for over a week or so without responding. If I see it on someone’s Facebook wall and they didn’t email me directly, I feel less and less the need to comment or email or call them.

With everyone practically putting every bowel movement on theirs on their Facebook page, I somewhere along the way became so desensitized to my real friend’s lives that I felt if it was on Facebook it somehow didn’t count. Taking the thought, “Well, if they really wanted me to know they would have called or emailed and not allowed me to find out with everyone else in the world on their Facebook page.” Recently a friend put on their Facebook page that their mother was going through a rough time medically and asked for prayers. I said a silent prayer but never responded to the “friend” because I don’t know, it seemed too trite to post on their wall that I was concerned for them and that I had said a prayer for them, their mother and their family.  Was it Facebook, the public notice to all or simply that this was someone that I used to spend almost every waking moment with over twenty years ago and hadn’t seen in about that long due to physical and emotional distance that I gave myself permission to not respond to their Facebook post? Another friend thanked people on Facebook for condolences about one of their family members who had passed. I didn’t even know someone had died in their family. I knew Army Archer of Variety and Patrick Swayze had died but not this person’s relative. How do you respond to that one? I did nothing.

So as life and technology moves on, I just want to remind everyone (including myself) that a personal note or call to a friend is still important and holds more weight than a “thumbs up” or one sentence post on their Facebook wall. That some “friends” were friends during a period of your life and not in it for the long haul and its okay to let them go from your current day life while reveling in the great times you once had. And finally that whole crap about “doing unto others as you would have them do unto you” is all well and good but if you’re going to dish it out you need to be prepared to take it too. Falling out of “friend” on Facebook and life – Don’t Get Me Started!

Arizona Governor Jan Brewer Revokes Domestic Partner Insurance Benefits For State Employees – Don’t Get Me Started!

If age has taught me anything it’s that nothing lasts forever. But unfortunately for Arizona state employees, forever didn’t even last a year. Last year, then Governor Janet Napolitano extended the definition of “dependent” to include Domestic Partners when it came to the state providing health benefit coverage. In a supposed effort to save the state money, now Governor Jan Brewer quietly signed a law this week redefining what a “dependent” is when it comes to the state’s responsibility for health benefit coverage. Her new “definition” does not include Domestic Partners of the same sex, Domestic Partners of opposite sex nor any of the above’s children aged 23-24 who are full time students or disabled adult dependents of state employees. According to reports from the web, this will affect 800 employees and of the 170 who applied for these benefits within the last year, forty were same sex couples and the rest fell into the other categories. From a $650 million dollar budget, this will save the state $3 million. In what everyone is calling a religious belief motivated move as opposed to a fiscally responsible move, those of us who got the news (and the wind knocked out of us) are of course angry but there’s also an overwhelming sadness. Arizona governor Jan Brewer revokes Domestic Partner insurance benefits for state employees – Don’t Get Me Started!

I was watching CNN the other day and they were showing the 91 year old Senator Byrd on the Senate floor (he was hospitalized and they were showing old footage with the story). Byrd was yelling and gesticulating to beat the band and a straight, forty-something co-worker said, “Wow, look at all of these old guys, they just don’t get it. They’re so out of touch.” This comment along with the news of Governor Brewer’s huge step back in the evolution of humanity with one swipe of her pen this week and the disgusting imagery of Tom Delay (yet another corrupt politician) strutting his stuff as it were on Dancing With The Stars, got me to thinking about the generation of white conservative politicians who are desperately trying to hold onto their power and fantasy of the world as it should be as the world changes around them. They refuse to see the world as it is and only see it as they wanted it to be back in 1950. All white, all men, all powerful.

And as I thought about this generation that continues to be in power, constantly trying to push down people who aren’t exactly like them, cutting their dirty deals, using government monies to fund their own pet projects or summer homes, I began to think of a monologue that Sidney Poitier delivered in the movie Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner written by William Rose. A landmark film about race, the movie is about a young girl (Katherine Houghton) who returns home from a trip to Hawaii in love with a black doctor (Sidney Poitier) whom she is anxious to marry. Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy are the girl’s parents and Beah Richards and Roy Glenn play Sidney Poitier’s parents. Roy Glenn’s character, a retired mailman has just finished telling Poitier everything he and his mother sacrificed to give Sidney Poitier’s character the advantages he had to go to good schools, become a doctor, etc. While the words are specifically about race and parents, I think it still resonates for those of us who see the generation before us so out of touch with the world and who we are as a generation.

“Let me tell you something. I owe you nothing. If you carried that bag a million miles, you did what you were supposed to do because you brought me into this world and from that day you owed me everything you could ever do for me, like I will owe my son, if I ever have another. But you don’t own me. You can’t tell me when or where I’m out of line or try to get me to live my life according to your rules. You don’t even know what I am, Dad. You don’t know who I am, how I feel, what I think. And if I tried to explain it the rest of your life you would never understand. You are years older than I am. You and your whole lousy generation believes the way it was for you is the way it’s got to be. And not until the whole of your generation has lain down and died will the dead weight of you be off our backs! You understand? You’ve got to get off my back, Dad. You’re my father. I’m your son. I love you. I always have and I always will. But you think of yourself as a colored man. I think of myself as a man.”

Do I think everyone in the generation before me doesn’t “get it” and needs to die before we’ll see change? No. My own parents do not feel this way and there are plenty of examples of even politicians like Ted Kennedy and all the work he did for equality that would prove me wrong in a second. But for me, it’s about the people who still believe there’s a “moral majority” the millions in a generation of people who still think it’s okay to make fun of blacks, gays, anyone who isn’t white like them. Who think they’re somehow better and therefore deserve benefits and rights that those of us who are “beneath them” do not deserve. Yes, I do believe that until those people in the generation before me have “lain down and died will the dead weight of them be off our backs.” And how sad that people in power like a Governor Brewer don’t get it and try to protect their antiquated view of the world and its inhabitants. To paraphrase from the quote above, “She only sees me as a gay man. I think of myself as a man.” Arizona governor Jan Brewer revokes Domestic Partner insurance benefits for state employees – Don’t Get Me Started!

Why I Think Hair Dying Is Best Left To Professionals And Gays– Don’t Get Me Started!

Do you remember the old television commercial for I think Ogilvie perms? It showed a person with a great looking perm and then the voiceover said, “Salon Perm or Ogilvie?” Well, I never tried to give myself a home perm (that stupid I’m not, although I did allow so-called professional hair people to talk me into getting perms throughout my life with only disastrous results – there were several of them because I’m obviously a slow learner  but allow me to give you just the highlights in this digression – 1. Turned my hair three shades lighter, you could see the rod marks in my head because my hair is so thin and I looked like a crazed twelve year old Shirley Temple, 2. A “root perm” that was supposed to give me “lift” from the root but actually just made the hair closest to my head seem like a matted mess with long straggly straight ends  - think Michael Jackson in the “Bad” years, 3. A “Body Wave” that made my hair look like a fifty year old woman’s hair from the 1950’s – set, teased and brushed out.) So the first few times I had my hair dyed I went to a professional. But I soon started worrying about getting that hair that seems only reserved for old men. You know, the ones who have dyed their hair so much that they finally end up just looking as if they’ve got shoe polish on an old Brillo pad that used to be hair? So I went to a demi-permanent hair color which just coats the hair shaft and doesn’t really “dye” the hair as much as it just “dresses the hair” in a different color. As this type of color fades out in a few weeks (instead of growing out leaving roots like permanent color) it began to seem increasingly stupid to pay all the money to a professional to put this semi-color on my head and so it came to pass that I convinced my partner to do it for me. After all, we’re gay so it should be no problem, right? Why I think hair dying is best left to professionals and gays – Don’t Get Me Started!

The first few times we did it, it looked fine but due to certain stubborn areas of gray hair at my temples and the fact that it wasn’t “permanent” color, it didn’t really cover the gray for more than ten minutes. This was a problem as this is why I was dying my hair to begin with so the next time, I told him to really cake it on, making it as thick as possible. It became apparent from this technique that while it was more successful at covering the gray hairs, it also (how shall I put this?) it also “stained” shall we say, my scalp. That’s right, looking something akin to the way that Eddie Munster looked, it was as if someone had taken a Sharpie pen and drawn in my hairline. No matter how much scrubbing I did with the special “color off skin” solvent, the color remained. The lesson learned here was two-fold, 1. Only dye my hair on Friday so my scalp had the weekend to fade a bit and 2. Baseball hats can truly be worn with anything if you have to go out somewhere.

So this past Friday I had decided it was the time to try again. With a new type of semi (or demi, whatever they’re calling it this week) hair color, I prepared my hair, the chair and my partner for the task ahead. “Just pour it on” I instructed from the chair clutching the old towel around my shoulders. Then it was time to wait to see the results. Well, it occurred to me (as I’ve always felt if a little is good, then a lot is better) that instead of leaving it on for the fifteen to twenty minutes that I should instead leave it on for forty minutes.  

As I leaned my head forward over the side of the tub and began rinsing my hair, I could see the brownish/black water staining what had been my newly cleaned tub. After several minutes with the blood rushing to my head and I was almost passing out, the water was still only light brown. I knew I had to continue the rinse cycle but my arm and constitution was getting weaker and weaker. I yelled for my partner who began to shove his hands through my hair, forcing water through it and squeezing my head to get the excess color off of my hair. Finally, I could come up for air and as I towel dried my hair and was hanging the towel up to dry I noticed that my left hand (that was going through my hair doing the scrubbing part of the rinsing while the right hand scooped water over my head) was completely brown. That’s right, my left hand suddenly looked as though it was my hand that was being dyed, not my hair at all. As my gaze went from my hand to the mirror, there it was. I pulled up my bangs back and there it was, color all over my scalp. Oh, not just the Eddie Munster on the hairline this time but as I separated the hair on the top of my head, my scalp actually resembled a leopard, filled with dye spots all over my scalp. As I scrubbed with the special solvent to get the color off of my skin to no avail and my scalp got redder and redder, I just stopped what I was doing and accepted my fate. I was now someone who had dyed hair AND a dyed scalp!

The up side to all of this is that my hair has never looked thicker but then again, my scalp was never the same color of my hair before. And so I think there’s a product in there somewhere for someone who is an actual professional. For those of us with thinning hair, if someone created a type of henna dye like they use for henna tattoos, then those of us with thin hair could have much thicker looking hair because our scalp would be, in essence, dyed with this other product. I’m not suggesting that if you have no hair or complete bald spots that this is a solution but for some extra depth for just thin hair, I think it could work. Not in the hairline as much as on the top of your head.

Well as the weekend went on each day I would shampoo, rinse and look. While the color looks good (though I’ve discovered that I have no idea if this is actually what my natural hair color was or if I just look like a dyed hair old man) my scalp spots seem to have not faded one bit. Ugh. So I think maybe next time, I shouldn’t rely on just the gay part but get a gay professional. Why I think hair dying is best left to professionals and gays – Don’t Get Me Started!

What The Mainstream Gay Themed Movies Of The 1980’s and 1990’s Are Still Teaching Me – Don’t Get Me Started!

For awhile now I’ve been rethinking the idea of adding the Logo network to my cable lineup. I so seldom find anything that I’m interested that’s playing on that channel that it almost makes me feel as though if this is the gay channel for gay people and I don’t find it interesting, then perhaps they’re coming to take my gay membership card away. But in a recent trip around the “guide” on my cable box I discovered a movie I’d never heard of from the early 1990’s, “Our Sons” that was playing on Logo. Featuring Julie Andrews as Hugh Grant’s mother and Ann-Margret as Zeljko Ivanek’s mother, the story is about Zeljko dying of AIDS, Grant as his partner and how everyone learns something about themselves when Andrews goes to bring Margret to her dying son who she had kicked out of the house at 17 for being, “one of those.” It’s a melodrama to be sure but as I sat there on tissue number seven or eight, I couldn’t help but feel sad that we don’t have these types of movies anymore and at the same time I thought about what the mainstream gay themed movies of the 1980’s and 1990’s are still teaching me – Don’t Get Me Started!

I think it’s wonderful that there are such things as a gay cable channel and that there are more movies made by gays about gays but to be honest most of them leave me disappointed. Either the scripts are awful and/or the acting is worse and usually I’m just bummed that I gave up two hours of my life (well, let’s face it, thanks to Tivo I can get through anything in under an hour now) but the point is that I’m almost always left feeling as though the movie was less than what it should or could have been. So in watching this TV movie from 1991, I wondered why with all its unforgiving TV underscore and Lifetime movie feeling I felt more about this than any of the more current movies I’ve watched with gay themes. Sure you could say it was the star power but there’s something more, the scripts and the direction are simply better and more thoughtful than the current trend of gay movies featuring more naked and sex but so much less when it comes to story, script and acting.

Yesterday on the radio I heard the song, “Making Love” now to most I’m sure this just sounds like some 80’s tune but to me it brought back memories of seeing this movie on cable probably the year after it came out, 1982 and how much it meant to a senior in high school about to go off and start his real life. Maybe it wasn’t a great movie but I think that anything you experience in life and then later look back on is colored by a lens of where you were at the time both physically and emotionally. To see Michael Ontkean leave Kate Jackson for Harry Hamlin only to find out that Hamlin was a slut and really didn’t want all the settling down that Ontkean wanted was heady stuff for a kid of 17 trying to figure out if there was a gay life for him other than what was pictured in the show biz world. Was there a gay life to be had beyond sailor hats (worn by the Village People and Charles Nelson Reilly) and being an old queen?

A big budget movie like “Philadelphia” or a small television movie like “An Early Frost” proved to mean so much to someone like me, someone who was growing up and not really knowing what being gay was all about other than you are attracted to men and have a desire to sing show tunes. Okay, I’m kidding (sort of) but what these movies did was not only show us the plight of those with AIDS and they’re family circumstances or in the case of “Making Love” coming out, it gave you reason to pause and reflect on a story that was about you and not about you all at the same time. Does that make sense? What I mean is that I don’t have HIV but I know people who do and those who have died from it but I was a little too young to lose masses of friends as so many did in the 80’s so while the storyline was mostly about AIDS awareness in these movies, for me it was seeing two men in a relationship and how it affected them and the people around them. Sure in most of these cases there was no real “Brokeback Mountain” sex on the screen, but you know what,  I didn’t and don’t need it if a story is good and well told.

I’ve seen a few movies in the last ten years or so that may come close to the aforementioned films (the first one that comes to mind is “Behind The Red Door” starring Keifer Sutherland, Kyra Sedgwick and Stockard Channing – more of a study in relationships that are unresolved and need to be resolved - excellent) but with more and more gay movie makers finding funding I’m wondering why it’s only in the case of a bio-epic like “Milk” that current movies only come close to being as powerful as the 80’s and 90’s movies? And so I put a call out to all movie makers, straight and gay, please do us all a favor, start looking back into the gay psyche and discovering amazing stories to tell. Sure the stories of AIDS and people struggling with it still exist and should still be in the forefront of our consciousness but just like the movies from decades ago taught as well as entertained (in any of the aforementioned movies you’ll find the lessons that you can’t catch HIV or AIDS from touch, etc.) we need good and melodramas about the plight of couples trying to get married, gays who are getting up there in age and can no longer run with the White Party crowd, movies about garden variety gays trying to find acceptance within themselves as well as their family and gays who try and want to be part of the gay Pride parade but find that it doesn’t really represent them. There are thousands of stories to tell and yet the only ones I seem to see are about the sensitive man from the south who moves to LA, discovers he’s really gay, has several soft-core porn scenes and finally decides the man of his dreams was living next door.

We owe ourselves and the next generation more. I think we’ve all become to accustomed to allowing reality television show us what being gay is all about but for my money, I’d rather a professional writer, cast and director tell me a well thought out story as I sit in a theatre or on my couch with popcorn being entertained and taught. As always a musical theatre reference comes to mind. In the musical, “South Pacific” Lt. Cable confronts his own prejudice when he falls in love with a Polynesian woman, singing the song, “You’ve Got To Be Carefully Taught” – “You’ve got to be taught to hate and fear. You’ve got to be taught, from year to year. It’s got to be drummed in your dear little ears, you’ve got to be carefully taught…You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late, before you are six or seven or eight. To hate all the people you’re relatives hate, you’ve got to be carefully taught.” Well, we need to be teaching tolerance, understanding and love so I’m hoping some movie maker somewhere does it soon so that the gay themed movies of the 80’s and 90’s won’t be all we and future generations have to look back on to be entertained and educated. What the mainstream gay themed movies of the 1980’s and 1990’s are still teaching me – Don’t Get Me Started!

I’m Afraid I’m Not As Interesting As I Once Was – Don’t Get Me Started!

As the years pass I become acutely aware of the reaction of people I’m talking with (whether it be professionally or personally). There was a time I used to tell everyone that I should be a professional party guest. I was convinced that I would be the perfect “plus one” at any event. I can hold my own on most topics (sports of course not included), listen when needed and in the witty comeback and double entendre department I was a clear leader. But as time wears on I notice that what was once amusement has turned into something else. As I tell the story of my meeting with and how I offended Army Archerd or retell the story of a cast member going on stage with a bra hanging off the front of her costume for the Before The Parade number in Hello Dolly, I’m more and more aware that while there’s a hint of a smile on their faces, behind their eyes are a dull sort of look. A look that makes me think that they’re making their grocery list or wondering when I’m going to finish or how they can excuse themselves instead of listening to or being interested in what I’m saying. I’m afraid I’m not as interesting as I once was – Don’t Get Me Started!

What most people don’t know is that being “the life of the party” is a pretty lonely existence. As I recently said to a friend of mine, “Gays may laugh with the witty guy but they always go home with the pretty one.” The conversation we were having was the “what if we were single again” conversation. After being with my partner for the past twenty-one years I don’t think that I could ever go out and be “on the market” again. Now, I’m sure if I HAD to that I would but I don’t think I’d be very good at it and I don’t think I’d be very successful at it. That said, on a recent adventure out to a gay event I found myself talking to a couple of guys in their early twenties who had been a couple for six months. They were in love and about the dullest gays you’d ever want to meet. As I stood there trying desperately not to keep drinking until I passed out, the conversation went from one mind dulling topic to another. I threw out my first double entendre – no response. Next a witty comment about what someone was wearing – nothing. Finally a reference to hating the gym – they loved working out and thought it was the greatest thing in the world and didn’t understand why I wouldn’t like it – sip, sip, gulp, gulp, “Oh waiter – another and yes, a double, thanks.”

I understand that what I wrote on my website the first day I created it (that I’m an acquired taste, you know, like Tab Cola) is true but the more I’m around people the more I’m starting to think that I may be no one’s taste. Thank God for the man of my dreams who I can still make laugh and arouse but the more I’m around people the more I find that I feel like the proverbial cheese that stood alone. I think what I say is funny and interesting but I’m thinking that somewhere along the line I’ve become Tigger (“the wonderful thing about Tiggers is I’m the only one”).  

I’ll admit that my references are oft times obscure or from a few decades ago. I admit that I always speak in analogies (maybe it’s from years of teaching kids, trying to get them to visualize what I was saying or perhaps it’s simply that it’s the only way I can understand most things myself). But as time goes on I’m just afraid I’m becoming the guy in the nursing home that wants to tell you a story. You know the one, in the wheelchair, smelling a little funny and going on for twenty minutes telling a story that could have been told in five minutes (Are you listening Mr. Tarantino with that Inglorious Basterds that was waaaay too long?).

Everyone has at least one thing that they’re good at and they know it. My one thing was being a witty conversationalist but as time wears on I find that not only has my audience seemed to have died off but that my act isn’t drawing the crowds it once did. I assure you it isn’t that my references are that old but they also no longer rise like champagne bubbles that tickle the nose and senses either (yet another analogy). I don’t know, maybe it’s a slump like a major league pitcher, or maybe it’s time to get a wheel chair and stop showering. I’m afraid I’m not as interesting as I once was – Don’t Get Me Started!

Learning To Accept Your Own Mental Illness – Don’t Get Me Started!

Have no fear, I have not suddenly completely lost my own mind and now believe that I’m a clinical psychologist or anything. In recent talks with some pals and my own introspection I discovered that no matter how much you think someone else has it all together, they don’t. And often times (surprisingly enough) they think you’re the one who has it all together and you don’t. So just lately I’ve started a new journey, one that will allow me to understand my own mental issues. (Well, anyone who knows me knows that it won’t be so much a “journey” as it’ll be a trip around the block.) Learning to accept your own mental illness – Don’t Get Me Started!

You must forgive my usual over the top dramatics on using the words, “mental illness” as I most likely wouldn’t get a diagnosis from a licensed doctor that I’m mentally ill (I don’t think I would anyway). I guess what I’m talking about more than anything is the crap that we put ourselves through and understanding why we do it. And why we sometimes can’t seem to help ourselves in repeating patterns in our lives that we know are no good for us at all. I’ve always prided myself on not doing what I call, “playing the victim” if I screw something up in a relationship or my checking account I accept the responsibility for what I’ve done and try to fix it to the best of my ability. But lately when I listen to people talk there seems to have been a monster shift to everyone I know thinking that everything else and everyone else is the problem but them. “My spouse doesn’t understand me”, “my friends only want to talk about their problems”, etc., etc. The economy, the President, the congress, Kayne West, the pastor, everyone is responsible for something that’s making the person’s life miserable when the old cliché is true, only you can choose how you react to something. No one pointed a gun to your head, making you an actual victim, you’re choosing to allow the actions of others dictate your feelings and because you don’t want to accept responsibility, it’s easier to blame someone else. (Trust me, as hard as I try to not do it, I do this too.)

My mental illness is that in my mind everyone else’s life and time is more important than mine. So I go about my days and nights listening to people go on and on about their own lives and problems, fixing things that aren’t even my area to fix and after about a seven or eight week cycle of this I blow up wondering why no one has asked me how my day was or why no one is fixing anything for me. (Ouch, that sounds awful “victimy” doesn’t it?) I choose to not express my feelings in words but more in the most silent silence and death ray stares that emanate from my eyes to anyone within a six mile radius. And why you may ask do I think everyone’s life and time is more important than my own? I’d like to think the reason for this is because my family is like the Kennedys who seem to each have given of themselves in service to their fellow man but I know this is not the case, the reason is because I have a curse that has been handed down for generations in my family, the curse of needing to be liked by everyone above all else. I’ll admit that getting beaten up in grade school and being less than unpopular in high school has had a lot to do with it but when I look at my parents and how they give so much of themselves to their friends and family (at the cost of their own mental stability at times) I realize that the old cliché is so true, “the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”

My mother has a huge medical book that allows you to peruse the different symptoms, diagnose your possible disease or ailment and then it gives you info on how to fix it. The how to fix it portion of each illness in the book reads, “What shall be done?” So when I look at what I’ve written in this blog I wonder “what shall be done” about my own mental illness? You see the problem is that growing up I used to hear, “if you admit you have a problem, that’s the first step.” But for me I always felt that admitting the problem is the only step I need to take. I’ve always been like, “Look at me, I know I’m fucked up emotionally. Isn’t it brave and wonderful of me to recognize it? What? Do something about it? Hell no, I just admitted it, isn’t that enough? Aren’t we done here?” But such is not the case, I get it. I have to learn to make better choices, tell people “no” and I’m sure a thousand other things. But having to fix myself is the least fun thing in the world to me. I know people who revel in it, reading every self-help book that comes along but for me there’s a real part of me that thinks, “Well, I’m sorta fucked up but I’m not killing anyone or hurting anyone else so since I’m used to all these demons (and all their friends that they’ve attracted over the years), why not just buy a larger imaginary backpack and continue to lug them all around with me wherever I go?” Because it’s not healthy, right?

And so I will hit the “reset” button on myself, trying to begin a new outlook, change some of my behaviors, “work on myself” and for your sake as well as mine, let’s just hope I’m not writing this same blog again seven weeks from now, right? The other thing I’ll try to do is be more tolerant of other people’s mental illness too. After all, that’s what friends are for, right? Learning to accept your own mental illness – Don’t Get Me Started!

Imagine If We Normal Folk Could Get Away With Using Celebrity Excuses (Kanye West) – Don’t Get Me Started!

Well now I have officially heard it all. Apparently on Jay Leno, Kanye West gave the excuse that his behavior of jumping on the stage, stealing the mic (and acceptance speech time) away from Taylor Swift to shout about Beyonce was due to his mother’s death…TWO YEARS AGO!!! What Beyonce, Taylor Swift and his mother’s death all have to do with one another I’m sure we’ll never know but as I listen to celebrity after celebrity explain away their bad or stupid behavior with excuses it makes me kind of jealous that we can’t use these excuses in our everyday lives. Imagine if we normal folk could get away with using celebrity excuses (Kanye West) – Don’t Get Me Started!

The first thing that always gets me is how so many celebrities are caught driving drunk. Never mind that they always seem to get off with six hours of community service while normal folk do prison time (which they should all do and they should never be allowed to drive again, period), the question I always have is why they’re driving in the first place? They’re going to a major Hollywood event that they spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to get ready for, what do they think they’re saving some money by not hiring a car for the night? And then once they do get caught the excuse list they give is something that makes about as much sense as the moral majority thinking they’re still the majority. I got stopped last night for speeding (not drinking and driving) but you didn’t hear me calling anyone a Nazi and getting away with it, are you listening Mel Gibson? Although I must say I always had wished I had the stomach to become an alcoholic. When you’re an alcoholic you can say and do whatever you want and then everyone behind you sort of whispers to one another, “Poor Scott, he was always so wonderful and nice to everyone until the <they soften their tone a little more> alcohol.”

Celebrity “complete exhaustion” – this one kills me. Celebrities are the most pamper lot in the world. Try being on a movie set for one day and you’ll see that they’re almost carried like a chihuahua from one thing to the next with several people tagging behind them to do everything but chew their food for them.  What are they so “exhausted” about? Live one day in my shoes you little babies and then you’ll get a sense of complete exhaustion. However I do think that we should all be afforded one “complete exhaustion” day from our jobs. You could only use the excuse once but how great would it be to call up and say, “I can’t come in today, I have complete exhaustion”?

Jesus when things are good and childhood trauma when things go bad. When they win awards, whether it be a music award and they’re a rapper who sings about fucking your brother and sucking your mother they thank Jesus. If they behave badly, they blame their childhood (or in Kanye West’s case with his recent bad behavior, his mother’s death). So thank you Jesus for the extra hits to my website this week and as far as me yelling at other drivers in traffic, it’s because of that piece of Styrofoam cup I almost swallowed when I was eight.

I get that celebrities and politicians get to live by different rules because they’re public figures. And while we’re on that subject, politicians make up just as many excuses as celebrities. The Senator Craigs of the world who are tapping their foot to get sex from men in the next stall who suddenly blame their “wide stance” for what they were doing claiming that they weren’t looking for sex at all to Senator Wilson’s outburst at Obama where he apologized but then later made excuses for his behavior, said he wouldn’t apologize anymore and then picked up $700,000 in campaign contributions for his “bad behavior” politicians use just as many excuses as celebrities.  

So let’s none of us take responsibility for any of our actions, shall we? Let’s all blame things from two years ago for our bad behavior, let’s all run amok with our sunglasses on acting like complete assholes and blame everyone else for everything we’ve done wrong. And when all else fails, say you were abused as a child. You can do almost anything in this world if you claim to have been abused as a child. That’s right from alcoholism to killing someone it’s all justified if you were abused as a child (or are a celebrity or politician). Imagine if we normal folk could get away with using celebrity excuses (Kanye West) – Don’t Get Me Started!

Project Runway Season 6’s Move To Los Angeles Has Hurt The Show – Don’t Get Me Started!

Before I start to get all the nasty-gram emails, let me say that for those who read my blog they know that having been the “Ultimate Fan Blogger” for season 3 of Project Runway with my blogs appearing on Bravotv.com, I’m a huge fan of the show. So when they finally worked through all the legal issues and moved the show to Lifetime (Television for women and gays – the “and gays” part is just implied in the title of the network) of course I was going to tune my Tivo to record every episode. But now that I’ve been watching for a few weeks I have to say that Project Runway Season 6’s move to Los Angeles has hurt the show – Don’t Get Me Started!

You would have thought that the producers of Runway could have learned taking a show about fashion and sending it to Los Angeles was a bad idea from when Tyra Banks tried it with America’s Next Top Model but perhaps they thought they could overcome what Tyra’s show could not. Well, I’m here to tell them that they’re wrong. Now I’m no snob, I like Los Angeles but it can’t compare to being the fashion capital of the US against the likes of the city that never sleeps, New York. It just can’t. That’s not an opinion, those are the facts kids so when Runway announced the LA move I was a bit dubious of the idea and yet at the same time did my best to keep an open mind but as I watch the episodes I see that they need to move season 7 (if there is one) back to its natural habitat of New York.

Oddly enough, the first thing I noticed about the show’s LA makeover was that Tim Gunn’s hair went from Lagerfeld white to a blond with darker blond low-lights. That’s right, Tim Gunn went Hollywood and as with most things, it just seems to not suit him at all – nor does the tan he’s sporting. I don’t know, it just seems that in fashion you can normally only trust the pale people who only get light from their sewing machines. The too tan folk in fashion always seem a bit suspicious and not “real” designers. But Tim’s makeover isn’t the only thing that seems to have changed a bit. Sure they have a Mood fabric store in LA like they do in New York but the laid back California approach seems to not appeal to the real heavy hitters of fashion when it comes to the guest judges.

And speaking of the judges, where is Michael Kors? Two or three weeks he has not been present which one can only assume is due to the fact that he needs to be at his studio which is in New York and not LA (another argument for the show being produced in New York). Meanwhile, last week was a real shocker. In the past Michael Kors and Nina Garcia were never gone at the same time. But on this past week’s episode there were three judges with Heidi and I couldn’t tell you who any of them were. There was the poor man who had his fake blond extensions in a hairstyle that was way too young for his age with a face that looks as if it’s one of the faces you pick out at a plastic surgeon’s office at Beverly Hills. Have you ever noticed that men who have a lot of plastic surgery seem to always end up looking alike? It’s as if there are four stock faces you can get when you have plastic surgery and you just choose one of the looks from the wall. At any rate, this male designer’s comments were about as generic as his face and the rest of his look. The other two women judges were non-descript as well. And so the whole thing left me feeling that if Nina and Michael can’t even be interested to be there then why should we all be interested in watching? I trust what Nina Garcia and Michael Kors have to say (most of the time) but don’t give me three people I’ve never heard of and ask me to be interested in their thoughts on fashion. If they’re going to do this then they should at least show some of the work that these designers have done or take a few moments to properly introduce the audience (and the contestants who seemed as perplexed as I) as to who these people are and how they have the credentials to be a judge on the show.

More than anything, anyone who has ever been in New York and then LA realizes that the whole pace of the two towns is very different. Perhaps one isn’t better than the other but the point is that with this type of show, I’d prefer they be in the fast paced heart of fashion (NYC) instead of one of the languid arms (LA). I want to take those paddles they use to restart someone’s heart to somehow restart the beat of the show and this includes the designers, judges and hosts. In the past we’ve had the outlandish of personality as well as design in the designers but this season seems to be all about the middle of the pack, no front runners in design or personality. And the personalities that used to be in the form of the judges and hosts are lacking too. No Michael or Nina, Heidi seems as though she’s phoning her performance in and Tim Gunn even admitted last week (a little sheepishly) that he’s become a cliché of himself, “I have to say the line. You need to go clean up your work station.” Sounding as if he was embarrassed that his comments have been reduced to mere catch phrases similar to a, “What you talkin’ about Willis?”

So while I’ve tried to reserve my judgment on the show, I’m afraid the time has come to speak. Now that the legal woes have been handled, let’s get through this season the best we can and then let’s pack everything up in a steamer trunk and take the show back home where it belongs, New York, shall we? If they don’t get back on track soon I’m afraid they’ll lose their audience to shows like Isaac Mizrahi’s The Fashion Show on Bravo which has a real designer hosting the show as well as coaching the contestants and focusing on sale-ability of designs. And let’s face it, at the end of the day would you rather put a show about fashion in the hands of gays like Mizrahi and Andy Cohen (the highest profile gay, gay, gayer than gay television executive running Bravo) or Heidi Klum and a network filled with Valerie Bertinelli movies from the 1990’s? Project Runway Season 6’s move to Los Angeles has hurt the show – Don’t Get Me Started!

Read My Season 3 Project Runway Blogs Here…

http://www.somelikeitscott.com/somelikerunway.html

Read My Season 4 Project Runway Blogs Here…

http://www.somelikeitscott.com/somelikerunway4.html

Beware Of Store Catalogs Telling You What To Wear – Don’t Get Me Started!

Okay, so I like to look at the big glossy (or matte finish as that’s what appears to be “in” this season) catalogs that come each season in the mail to show me the latest designer wares and the stores where I can get the items and how much it’s going to cost to wear them. Now while I love me some Barney’s New York, when the men’s version of their fall catalog appeared in my mailbox I was pretty darned excited I don’t mind telling you but within two flips of the pages I discovered what I always seem to discover, what they’re selling I won’t be buying. Beware of store catalogs  telling you what to wear – Don’t Get Me Started!

In the case of the Barney’s men’s catalog for fall apparently if everything in your closet isn’t plaid then you apparently should just stay home. I’ve never seen so many different plaids and yet no matter how they matched the plaids to the pants, suits and other plaid items I discovered that I’m not a plaid wearing person. The only time I was even slightly interested in plaid was when the Bay City Rollers were around shouting about S-A-T-U-R-D-A-Y, Night! (And that was strictly a Tiger Beat crush sort of thing on the boys in the band and not so much the plaid fabric) I’ll admit I went along with the argyle for the past couple of seasons but this time I’ve decided to sit out the plaid invasion.

You see, as with most things, I seem to have a problem with authority. That’s right, I remember that under my cap and gown for my high school graduation I was wearing a black polo shirt (collar up of course), gun metal shiny parachute pants (with all the zipper pockets that the law would allow) and a pair of Van’s high-top sneakers that were black and white checkered. I wore that because I thought it looked cool and because I thought it looked good on me. Now I understand that there are a lot of misguided people out there who think something looks good on them and it doesn’t (are you listening chubby girls with the crop tops and your abdomen spilling out over the pants, framed by the line of your rolled over waistband and the bottom of your crop top?) but on the whole I think if you take some time in front of a mirror you’ll discover what looks good on you and what doesn’t. I’ve never been someone who just bought what the mannequin was wearing because usually the mannequin’s proportions are so bizarre that no one could look good wearing what the mannequin is wearing. Also, when dressing I say you have to “dare to be different” at least a little bit. Sure you can wear khakis every day and a blue shirt but there’s something about wearing that green shirt with the purple tie that will show your co-workers you’re not working at Blockbuster and that you’re confident about yourself and what you wear.

I’m just as guilty as the next guy of basically wearing a uniform every day even though my office doesn’t require one. I wear the same things day after day and just hope that no one notices, that perhaps they don’t know that it’s Tuesday so I have the navy pants on again. But I suspect that when you’re a gay people do notice and wonder why you’re not living up to the gay stereotype and fashion powers that are no doubt given to gays at birth. But like the people who wear ratty flannel pants out in public, they use the “comfortable” defense but mine is the “it’s easy” defense and neither one should be allowed. I need to start making more of an effort in my day to day dressing but what I can tell you is that even though I get that I need to dress better, “better” isn’t always what the fashionistas or retail stores are telling me to wear in their latest catalog. Nope, sometimes you DO have to dare to be different. To wear what you know looks good on you but most importantly, find clothes that fit your body and your personality.  Beware of store catalogs telling you what to wear – Don’t Get Me Started!

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In Spite Of Everything I Still Believe… - Don’t Get Me Started!

It’s the eighth anniversary of 9/11 and while I think I’m supposed to be remembering all of those who lost their lives that day (and I certainly remember exactly where I was at the time on that day). I find my thoughts going to other places today and while some of those thoughts are quite negative, as Anne Frank said, “In spite of everything, I still believe…” – Don’t Get Me Started!

Should I be ashamed that I didn’t really think about this being the anniversary of the attack the moment I woke up? That it took the morning news to remind me? I don’t think so. There’s something about getting on with life that I think is truly important after tragedy. Now that’s not to say that I think we should forget it, by all means I wouldn’t be a Jew unless somewhere in me I wasn’t programmed to reflect often on the Holocaust, the morons who say it never happened and as most survivors reminded us for years after the war, “Never Forget.” I’ll never forget the holocaust or 9/11 but I also won’t carry it on me like a kids’ backpack that has been overstuffed with a load far too heavy for them to carry either.

When I got to my office, the gentleman who comes once a week was cleaning the office and as we talked about 9/11 he told me about his struggle to become an American citizen, that it had taken twenty years of red tape for him to finally a few weeks ago, be allowed to take the test and become an American citizen (he’s only waiting for the swear in ceremony at this point). He told me that one of the questions on the test was what happened on 9/11? I guess it’s good to make sure that people becoming citizens understand that we as a country have been under attack (by outside forces as well as some internal morons). He also told me that as he talked about the test with his different clients he was a little surprised that new citizens seem to know more about our country than those of us who were born here. I wasn’t surprised. The same thing happened when my best friend of a lifetime converted to Judaism, she was more Jewish than I’ve ever been in my life (and took great delight in constantly reminding me of how much more she knew than me). But it is sad that the people becoming citizens are required to know more than we know. Maybe we as American citizens need to take a test every once in awhile to make sure we know about our own country? Maybe we should care more about that then whether Jon Gosselin was dumped or whether or not Ellen Degeneres will be a good judge on Idol?

And then I started my computer and went to see what news was happening in the world from my Google homepage. I came across a “Breaking Story” about the South African runner who they now say has been tested to find out if she is intersex (having both male and female genitalia) and if she is no one knowing what they’ll “do” with her, then my eye went to a story about a British code breaker in World War II who basically changed the way people break codes, including building a machine that could break codes which eventually became the ground floor of the computer I’m typing on now. In the early 1950’s he was convicted of homosexual activity. He was given the choice of imprisonment or castration. He chose to be castrated and killed himself two years later. What a brilliant mind that was destroyed by hate and lack of people understanding homosexuality. Some self professed computer geeks went about having a petition signed to have the British government offer a public apology posthumously, which they have now done.

So with those who believe the enemy is always outside their countries borders (and in the case of 9/11, I believe they were both inside and outside our borders) or the way backward thinking can destroy one of your own countrymen (as with the story of Alan Turning, the World War II code breaker in England) I have to wonder if we should all take some sort of version of the Hippocratic oath and promise one another to “do no harm.” Let’s face it, I may be disturbed by the fact that as a gay man I’m considered a second class citizen in the eyes of my own country’s laws that continually talks about equality for all men but at the same time, I guess I also need to be thankful that no one is castrating me, that the world has gotten a little smarter. And so as I read all the negative news and things that have happened I’m going to also stop for a moment today and try to renew my enthusiasm for life and the people in it. In spite of everything, I still believe…Don’t Get Me Started!

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Real Life Homosexuals – Don’t Get Me Started!

The more I live the more I realize that homosexuals are exactly what the stereotypes portray and at the same time have nothing to do with the homosexual stereotype. How can this be true? Because the more homosexuals become comfortable with who they are and society does too, what you discover is that just like every other person on this planet, no two are alike but sometimes they have a lot of similarities with the group they associate with the most. So, in an effort to break through what has long been a problem for us gays of being seen only as boa wearing, float riding, queens all the while defining ourselves with such limited views and terminology such as “Twinks” (boys), “Bears” (furry bigger men), etc. perhaps it’s time for us all to break through a bunch of false categories and become real life homosexuals – Don’t Get Me Started!

CNN.com carried a story yesterday stating, “Gay Latino Americans Are Coming Of Age” now while some may applaud CNN for carrying this story, once I began to read the article about how Perez Hilton is a Latino Pioneer I threw up in my mouth a little and stopped reading. Sure Perez Hilton gets a lot of press but please, let’s not for one minute forget how he got to where he is today. Perez Hilton began as an actor who wasn’t good enough to get any work, started outing gay actors who were working and then advanced to drawing cumshots on celebrities on a website where every other bitter non-celebrity could laugh together at someone that they could and would never be, someone with a real career. Kudos to him for continuing to push the envelope, his waistline and the color anyone’s hair should be in order to create a niche for himself that now allows him to be a sorta famous person but at what expense to the gay and Latino communities? (By the way he changed his name to sound more Hollywood and less Latino from Mario Lavandeira, Jr. to Perez Hilton so I’m sure the Latino community isn’t doing back flips of excitement about him being considered a “Latino Pioneer” either.) Amazingly enough, Perez Hilton is like a cockroach who will not die, only the other day he was on the Tyra Banks show. She had him on to dispel some of the crap written about her as she decided to go sans weave to show her real hair. In the segment with Hilton she asked him if he would please not go after children of celebrities who were under 18 years of age. Hilton balked originally but after much back and forth, Tyra made her deal with the devil that he would stop drawing on, making fun of and exploiting celebrity children for six months if Tyra would put him on an episode of America’s Next Top Model. This reprehensible human being does not represent the gay community in any way. Oh sure, he’s gay but we’d gladly trade him and Lance Bass in for Cagney and Lacey! (To see my vblog about why I don’t want Perez Hilton to be the face of gay America, click here - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9gXpd4-soE)

But enough about Hilton and on to the issue at hand. I’m tired of hearing about “Downlow Black Gays” or “Latino Gays Coming of Age” – isn’t it time that we all realize that gays are just as dull and/or as fascinating as straights and while we can also be defined by our religious and ethnic backgrounds as well as our sexuality, the gays who are really breaking ground are the real life homosexuals who every day live their lives with dignity and honor. They go to work, they help in their community and often times they don’t even have a rainbow flag in front of their house. (Can you imagine???) I’ve always considered myself a “garden variety gay” as I’m not all that flashy (except when I need to be), I’ve been with the same man in a monogamous relationship forever and I don’t try to hide nor flaunt my gayness at work or in most social situations. I prefer to be myself as opposed to someone who has a pink triangle on his computer monitor at work and rubber bracelet around my wrist that’s engraved with “equality now.” If you need those things to feel better about yourself then by all means have at it but more and more there are more of me out there than you (And thank GOD!). There are a lot of us gays who have discovered that we don’t have to be a stereotype just because we’re gay, we don’t have to wear assless leather chaps or any of the other thousands of perceptions that people people themselves have about the homosexual lifestyle. We can be ourselves and my hope for those gays out there like the flamboyant Hilton, downlow gays, etc. is that they would spend more time working on accepting themselves so that they would be more enjoyable to be around and therefore would gain much more acceptance for themselves and by others. Enough of the affected lisping, “Girl, no you didn’t” type of persona, try being yourself for a little bit boys and girls and I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised. So here’s my message to all gays, “Stop being what you think gay is and be a real life homosexual (for all our sakes).” Real life homosexuals – Don’t Get Me Started!

How Long Before It The Maps To The Movie Stars Homes Become Maps To The Foreclosed Homes? – Don’t Get Me Started!

The world has changed since I was young. I’m soon to be forty-five and while many my age prefer to act and think that they’re twenty-two, I am not one of them. I realize that I’ve begun to look at the world through an older set of eyes that are not so much cynical as they are nostalgic for a simpler time when I was younger. I’m sure it didn’t seem like a simpler time to my parents or the adults then but boy what I would give for a Saturday night of staying up late to watch the Carol Burnett show and Saturday Night Live with the “real” cast (Gilda Radner, John Belushi, Jane Curtain, etc.). So as I was driving around the other day here in Vegas I noticed a foreclosure sign on a house that also said, “Featured on Home Closure Tours” and I began to get really sad. Sure about the people who lost their home but more about the fact that I remember going to LA every year on vacation when I was little and seeing the people on the street corners selling maps to the movie stars homes in case you wanted to drive by and see where Lucy lived. Now our street corners are filled with different people, selling themselves more than a product but how long is it before the maps to the movie stars homes become the maps to the foreclosed homes? – Don’t Get Me Started!

I never really understood the people who were hired to stand on corners to spin signs but in the age where so many were losing their jobs and the youth seem apathetic to being a part of the country other than becoming an instant hit on American Idol, I resigned myself to the fact that it gave someone a job. But recently here in Vegas the corners are less and less filled with people spinning signs and more people with pieces of cardboard from a box or something with scrawled lettering about being out of work, needing money and/or a job. I grew up in Arizona and although I don’t know that you would call it Beverly Hills it certainly wasn’t the slums. The street corners were never filled with people who camped out all day spinning signs or asking for cash, they were just the place you stopped before you crossed the street to get to the other corner and then go on your way. Now the street corner has become a much more insidious place than the corners you used to see on Barretta where the prostitutes hung out. At least that only seemed to be in one section of town and had a cute quirky character like, “Huggy Bear” maintain law and order. Now every corner of every street USA is a place many call home and ask for a handout. When did this happen? It seems as though it happened so fast. It’s not like 9/11 or the moon landing where you can remember exactly what moment on what day it happened, it progressed over time but it’s progressing at the rate of cancer that can’t be cured it seems.

I have to admit that when I’m stopped at a light and the person walks through the cars with their cardboard sign looking for cash, I do what we were taught to do in school. Don’t make eye contact or the teacher will call on you. I don’t make eye contact, I check email on my phone or act as if I’m adjusting something in my car that couldn’t possibly wait another moment and should most definitely take precedence over the person begging at my car window. How can I do that? How can I ignore another human being or their plight? I find myself truly disappointed in myself at these times. Maybe that’s why I gave the guy at the gas station twenty dollars when he told me he couldn’t get his disability from Arizona and just needed something to eat to keep his insulin in check because he suffered from Diabetes and hadn’t eaten in days. Maybe that’s why I started looking at giving to charities that feed people as opposed to take care of equal rights for gays or a holocaust museum. The others are important but how can you put the holocaust of the 1940’s over someone who lived through it who is starving right this minute? I wonder how these charities survive in this day and age. It can’t be easy to be the holocaust museum or some of the other more than worthwhile charities when people are suffering to just have food and shelter. Yet, Jerry Lewis still managed to raise his staggering amount of cash so I guess it’s not hurting every charity.

Look, I know that it’s a good thing that realtors are putting together these tours of foreclosed homes. It helps people find great deals on houses, it helps increase the property value in the neighborhood because there’s someone living next door actually caring for the house instead of letting the lawn die, losing all curb appeal. (In Arizona I read that the state is paying to spray paint lawns of foreclosed homes green so that property values won’t suffer from dried up dead lawns – not sure that’s a solution as it costs something like $600 a house and needs to be redone often but what do I know?)

As someone once said to me, I don’t have the answers, I only have the questions. But I can’t help remembering sitting in the back seat of my parents car as we drove past the street corners with the people selling maps to the movie stars homes. How glamorous I thought, to know where all of the movie stars live. I wonder how my generation’s kids will feel about what they see from the backseat of their parents’ cars as they drive and see the street corners filled with something very different than maps to the movie stars homes. How long is it before the maps to the movie stars homes become the maps to the foreclosed homes? – Don’t Get Me Started!

How Many People Know Pieces Of The Puzzle That Are You? – Don’t Get Me Started!

The first time I saw the documentary Grey Gardens was about two years ago or so. I joined it all ready about five or ten minutes in progress but I remember not being able to look away from the television screen the entire time it was on. And after the film was over I sat there alone in my home, not speaking, not moving, not watching any more television, just sitting there…thinking. The existence of the Beales couldn’t be any further from me or anything I’ve ever experienced but there was something about these wonderfully damaged people living in squalor that made me begin to reflect on my own life. So the other morning when I turned on the television and caught the last twenty minutes of the HBO movie Grey Gardens starring Jessica Lange and Drew Barrymore, I found that odd sense of inward reflection starting all over again. It stayed with me as I went to get my coffee and as the women behind the Starbucks counter greeted me I began to wonder, how many people know pieces of the puzzle that are you? – Don’t Get Me Started!

Try to follow me for a moment. When you watch Grey Gardens you see a mother and daughter who seem to know everything about one another. Using one another’s weaknesses to bind them together and at the same time using one another strengths to lean on one another you realize that although you would think that they knew everything about one another and one couldn’t exist without the other, when Edie Sr. passed away, Edie Jr. began a life of performing cabaret acts, travel and moved on from Grey Gardens (something that when you watch either movie, you think would be completely impossible for her). So although the two women were inextricably connected there had to be some things that even these women didn’t know about one another. Whether it was dreams or fears, who knows but that’s when I began to think about the simple pieces of my life that certain people know about and others do not. The women at Starbucks know exactly how I like my coffee and yet my partner of twenty-one years would have no idea. It’s a small thing but once you start in this vein of thinking, I think you’ll be surprised to find out just how complex you are and how interesting it is that you share certain pieces of the puzzle that is you with certain people but only you can see the picture that is on the front of the box, the whole puzzle that creates the picture that is you.

I wasn’t a puzzle fanatic when I was little but I did my fair share of puzzles. I remember that some people built the puzzle from the outside in and others started on major portions or pictures at the center of the puzzle and then built the puzzle from the inside out. I would assemble all of the outside pieces and then carefully studying the box top (which I would prop up so that I could see it better) I would begin to construct the inside, the picture within the frame so to speak. The older I get I realize that I’ve continued on that same path in my life too. I have always constructed who I wanted to be from the outside in and when I did theatre I did the same thing. I worked on the character’s physicality before I thought about the emotional state of the character (perhaps this is why I’m not a big name today in theatre). The interesting part to me is that I don’t think I’ll ever achieve the picture that I want to see on the box top of the puzzle that is my life and even though it may look to others as though I have the puzzle put together perfectly, to me there will always be a few pieces that don’t fit quite right or have an edge peeled up a bit.

Maybe like most things in my life, I’ve taken this puzzle analogy too far. But what I wanted to do was to intrigue you to think about the different parts of your life (puzzle pieces) you share with certain people and not with others. The people at work see one side of you but you may not share it all (nor should you probably). The same goes with friends, right? I mean just like I’m learning to separate certain people from certain information on Facebook, the same can be said of my life. I have the friends who are strictly fluff, they’re the ones I go out with and we laugh and laugh and laugh and then I have the friends with whom I share deep life thoughts with and still there is another group of acquaintances that I see at other friends’ events and we’re cordial but they see only a very small portion of me. You can say the same of certain family members or the dry cleaner for that matter. Think about all the different people you come in contact with and the different pieces of the puzzle that are you that they know or hold onto. Maybe that’s why life is so precious? Because no matter how well you know someone, you don’t know everything about them. You can’t hold someone else’s puzzle box with all the pieces in it just waiting to be reassembled; they take at least a few pieces of their puzzle with them to the grave. And so true do we take the pieces of the person’s puzzle we know and we carry them with us like precious trinkets we collected when we were kids, a collection that may seem like junk in an old cigar box to someone else but to us, they are glorious treasures in a treasure box. How Many People Know Pieces Of The Puzzle That Are You? – Don’t Get Me Started!

Things I Don’t Understand – Don’t Get Me Started!

I have always known that my mind is filled with such things as every lyric to Funny Girl as opposed to the proper interest rate for stocks and bonds or how to plan my retirement (which I can’t even contemplate having one so I guess I’m not ever going to retire). My mind is constantly filled with information that is of no use to anyone really. And even my references that I use in conversation people sometimes have to think about three or four times because they don’t remember the time when Bobby Brady took baked beans in a flashlight to the Indian boy in the Grand Canyon (which I credit as being the original Brokeback Mountain but perhaps that’s just me). At any given point on any given day there is so much I don’t understand that it boggles my mind. So today I thought I’d make a list of things that are beyond my comprehension. Things I don’t understand – Don’t Get Me Started!

I don’t understand how you can be a “personality” (Jon Gosselin are you listening?) and yet have no personality.

I don’t understand how anyone can take anything that Rush Limbaugh says and think it’s more than an old white guy in a desperate attempt to garner attention rather than someone educated trying to educate or inform.

I don’t understand why teachers are paid so crappy and yet they’re the first ones who get blamed when kids are stupid. Seems to me the parents are the stupid ones for not taking an active part in nurturing and teaching their children, pawning it off on teachers. Just as stupid is our government for not sending better funding for the people shaping the generation to come so that it attracts a higher level of teacher but then again, maybe it’s just me.

I don’t understand how anyone could have thought The Blair Witch Project was “brilliant.”

I don’t understand anything about math. I can add the same numbers three times and come up with four different numbers…see?!?

I don’t understand how some people can be on Facebook all day and night every day and night.

I don’t understand people who have nothing to say but go on and on and on.

I don’t understand why I’m not famous.

I don’t understand why my body can’t look like those twenty year olds at the gym even though I’m twice their age, don’t work out as much as them and don’t have metabolism anymore.

I don’t understand how you can think that shirt goes with those pants but I guess, good for you.

I don’t understand how I can think I’m not a grudge holder yet I can remember every moment of why someone pissed me off and immediately get mad about it all over again (even years later) as if I’m Al Pacino doing Method Acting, using sense memory.

I don’t understand how people can say they “don’t have a problem with people being gay” yet they don’t understand my problem with not getting all the rights of straight people in the eyes of the law.

A Message To Gays Who Take Their Shirt Off In Clubs – Don’t Get Me Started!

This past weekend I had a dear friend in from LA visiting and so we decided (though we’re both happily coupled to the men of our dreams – him even married as he was fortunate to get married to his male mate before California let the Mormons pay for the pass of Prop 8) we decided to go dance ourselves into a frenzy at the supposed one gay club on The Strip, Krave. Truth be told there were a lot of gays but also tons of straightees of the male and female persuasion at this club and I’m convinced that this is the wave of the future, that every club will be a good mix of the gay, straight and greedy (what I call bisexuals). Like a Benetton ad or the song, “We Are The World”, I’m thinking that this is the way to bring about real change. After all, can anything bring people closer than dancing, drinking and puking around one another? And although I’m sure that this happens at straight clubs as well (from watching footage of Spring Break and other straightee get togethers on television) the proclivity some men have for taking their shirts off should be more of a privilege in my opinion than a right. A message to gays who take their shirt off in clubs – Don’t Get Me Started!

If you’ve never been to a gay club let me just tell you that at most they have what you would call “Go Go Boys” – which are muscular boys who dance on boxes in their underwear or sometimes elaborate costumes and people put money in their crotches. (Not bad work if you don’t get too many paper cuts, right?) Make no mistake about it, these are not all gay boys earning their living by shaking their money makers, a lot of times these are straight boys who adore the attention of the boys and men at gay clubs and can make a crap load of money from those gays who think there’s a possibility of bagging and tagging a straight guy. It’s a win-win for everyone. The guys on the dance floor get to look at the hot boys on boxes and the boys on boxes make their living from undulating and feeling themselves up to the delight of the crowd. In certain towns these boys can barely do step touch without falling off the box or they’ve taken so many steroids that they simply look like lobsters with their abdomens looking like a well seasoned lobster tail spilling out of the shell on a plate at a fine restaurant. They sort of bop to the music but there’s really no dance skill, though let’s face it I don’t think anyone is tipping them or trying to take them home based on their dance abilities. However, in Vegas, I’m proud to say that both the straight and gay Go Go Boys seem to actually know how to dance and undulate all at the same time. Fabulous, right? That said, the boys on the boxes have bodies that range from slim toned to so muscular that you think you’re looking at one of those bodybuilder magazines that supposed straight guys get for the articles <wink, wink, nudge, nudge>. But for the most part, they are the “gold standard” if you will for what a well toned body should look like if it is being flaunted in public.

This brings me to the many men who I hope are so drunk or drugged that in some strange way they think they meet the gold standard of the Go Gos (not to be confused with the Belinda Carlisle band from the 80’s) when in fact the drugged and drunk oft times do not only not meet the gold standard but not even the gold vermeil standard. I guess I should be saying good for them that they’re comfortable enough with themselves to take their shirt off in public, let alone around people who look amazing with their shirts off, all the while their guts hanging over their pants and looking more like someone’s Dad who is mowing the lawn in the backyard (complete with the t-shirt that was taken off tucked into the pants and hanging looking like a God only knows what). But please, for the sake of the gays and straights alike who have to look at you with your out of shape body out in the public without some fabric over it, if you want to do that go to a nudist colony where no one cares. Believe me when I tell you that everyone at a gay bar cares what you look like once the shirt comes off. You see God gave us fashion to disguise our flaws and be able to take someone home no matter what sins were lying underneath, once you take your shirt off the illusion and your sins of too many burgers and fries are on display for all to see. So just do me a favor, the next time, before you cross both arms in front of you and grab the hem of your t-shirt to do your big reveal, stop a moment and decide if what lies underneath really needs to be seen by others. A message to gays who take their shirt off in clubs – Don’t Get Me Started!

If VH1 Shows Are Reality, I’ll Happily Stay In Fantasyland (with the fairies) – Don’t Get Me Started!

The recent tragedy that unfolded when a contestant on VH1’s reality show, Megan Wants A Millionaire, killed his wife, cutting off as much of her identity as he could, stuffing her in a suitcase, running to Canada and ultimately killing himself is absolutely horrific. But I can’t say that it’s surprising if you’ve ever watched even one half hour of VH1 or any of the other glut of reality shows on television that make “stars” out of unstable people as we voyeuristically look on feeling so much better about our own mental deficiencies and the occasional bad choice of a mate. And although VH1 took the show off the air, showing that someone (or some lawyer) had sense enough to know that it shouldn’t be on featuring a murderer (though they say they’ll bring it on when the timing is “appropriate”). The network no doubt lost all of fourteen dollars that it takes to make reality television – remember people who go on reality shows at this point are looking more for the fame than the fortune, the most expensive thing no doubt is renting these mansions they use. But I digress. A recent viewing of the first episode of Tool Academy on VH1 (I admit I’m not immune to the guilty pleasure of trash television) it dawned on me that if VH1 shows are reality, I’ll happily stay in Fantasyland (with the fairies) – Don’t Get Me Started!

If you don’t know the set up of Tool Academy, allow me to give it to you in one sentence. Unstable, egotistical guys get brought to a house by their pathetic low self-esteem girlfriends to hopefully be transformed from a “tool” to a human. They go through some ridiculous challenges and they earn badges like Girl Scouts all the while fighting with one another, their “true self” (so there’s some crying from the steroid induced assholes) and a lot of head shaking for those of us watching the show. What I think VH1 got wrong here is that anyone can see these guys with their pumped up bodies, acting as if they’re “pimps” and wearing their Ed Hardy sequined tops anywhere. I don’t know, maybe it’s because I live in Vegas but all you have to do is walk down the Strip and you’re bound to run into these guys with their enormous biceps, rage and small penises. But what VH1 SHOULD be doing if they wanted to make interesting television is instead of “fixing” the boyfriends, they should be fixing the girlfriends so that they can understand what part of them is in need of an asshole in their life, discover their own self-worth and ultimately move onto finding a suitable mate that will be kind and loving instead of sequined and stupid. I must admit I do love that they give each of the “tools” a “tool name” for the show. Who wouldn’t want to date “Alpha Male Tool” or “Eye Liner Tool”?

Look, no one is mentally 100% healthy out there (and yes, I include myself) but as long as we continue our “Lion vs. Man in the arena” mentality I think we’re all in need of some therapy. As we watch these damaged people pull one another and themselves apart is it any different than having a better seat with close ups from the coliseum in ancient Rome in your own home? I used to think the whole Mixed Martial Arts fights were barbaric but the emotional damage that these people come in with (and I believe leave with) seems so much more pervasive in reality television that getting an ear bit off or a bloody nose in a cage seems almost more civilized. The Christian Right love to tell us about how the anal sex from Sodom and Gomorrah brought down that civilization but I’m thinking that the display of emotionally damaged humans on television as they become more damaged may just be a little more damning for society than some guys taking it up the ass.

Look, I know why reality television started, it was cheap for the networks to produce and we all like to look at celebrities as we build them up only to revel when they get torn down (you don’t have to look much further than Jon and Kate plus who cares anymore to see that) so the idea of taking “normal” people and putting them in intense situations all the while making them think they’re “stars” instead of the “fools” that they are (and would have been in Elizabethan times) served its sick purpose for all involved (and I include those of us who watch from home). But perhaps there’s a glimmer of hope out there somewhere. As BBC announced that this will be the last season for their Big Brother (another thing, we arrogant Americans think we invented reality television when it was really the Brits along with almost every other show from sitcom to drama that was originally produced in the UK before coming to “the states”) so perhaps we’re going to see a shift in what we see on television and although it may be too presumptuous of me, maybe we won’t see “thugs” and “unstable” people being glorified on television anymore.

Perhaps the reality “stars” will go back to living in their parents’ basements, telling everyone how cool they are all the while wearing their fake diamond car hood ornaments for jewelry, saving up for rhinestone encrusted teeth and tattooing themselves whenever their parents will give them the money. They’re just as much of a drain on society as they ever were, not giving back or doing anything of real value so make no mistake about it, giving them a platform like television hasn’t made them more useful to society it’s just given the rest of us something to take our minds off of the fact that while our government continues to debate, the health insurance and drug companies are making sure that health is only for the rich, the religious right continues to try to keep its stronghold on making everyone who doesn’t believe in their Jesus as second class citizens and the old guard of white men who feel their grip on ruling the country is giving way have no place to go but television themselves as they rant and rave like street corner prophets hoping to make a name for themselves on the same medium as the thugs. Is there a real difference between Rush Limbaugh and Alpha Male Tool? I don’t think so. And both are so mentally unstable that if you want your kid to be successful you’ll make them become a psychologist because trust me, just flick around the television and you’ll see how many of us need a good lay down on a couch with a professional (and sometimes the “professional” is even a therapist too <wink>). If VH1 shows are reality, I’ll happily stay in Fantasyland (with the fairies) – Don’t Get Me Started!